4 yellowlegs bring 2 questions to mind

All the clouds were somewhere else; the crescent moon rested on the western horizon like a bowl on a table; stars spangled the sky the way sunshine sparkles the undulating water of a mountain lake.

On this stage a bird passed from south to north, a bird invisible to the eye but discernible to the ear. A disembodied voice, it called with a tone that was both a whistling and a piping, a sigh and a cheer.

To hear it was to know it.

A lesser yellowlegs. A second and a third. A fourth.

As I sat on my patio in the darkness that is the morning of spring, I heard the mellow calls and felt a sense of the world presenting itself to me as it passed by.

The lesser yellowlegs -- so named for being smaller than the related species called "greater yellowlegs" -- claims middle ground among its sandpiper kin. Long lower legs and long feet give it a height factor that makes it seem bigger than it really is; but at 10 inches long with a 20-inch wingspan, it merely measures larger than some but smaller than others.

Some place on nesting grounds -- central Alaska across Canada to Hudson Bay -- probably called to the four yellowlegs, beckoning them, so that their calls to me were at once a hello and a goodbye.

Listening for more yellowlegs to pass. I wondered about the four and imagined where they might have spent their winter.

A species granted an inclination to wander, individual lesser yellowlegs occasionally visit the shores of South Africa, New Zealand, Hawaii and the Falkland Islands. More routinely, they overwinter in wetlands from Arizona to the Carolinas, coastal areas around the Gulf of Mexico and Central America southward to Tierra del Fuego.

Such a world traveler will inevitably encounter relatives from other continents.

Some Eurasian relatives go by the names "redshanks" and "greenshanks." Our yellowlegs could just as easily be named "yellowshanks" or the birds over there could be called "redlegs" and "greenlegs." But they aren't. Still other related species go by the names "sandpiper" and "tattler" and "willet" rather than by either "graylegs" or "grayshanks."

When wildlife names are involved, consistency seems to confuse people more than does random and capricious indifference. Some people actually prefer chaos in wildlife names; and they, too, have a place in the world. It's a small island halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica.

But in the moment of enjoying the night passage of my four yellowlegs, I did not think of name and identity issues much less dwell on them. My musings explored the possibilities of where those sandpipers might have been and where they might be going.

Nothing I can do in the freedom of my own mind will ever answer those two questions, and that uncertainty makes the four yellowlegs a pleasant bit more interesting.

Moon gone, I sat on the patio and sent my ears prowling through the spring darkness. Watching a satellite creep among the stars and listening to memories of yellowlegs voices, I found the birds to be the more intriguing of the two.

Kevin J. Cook is a freelance writer and naturalist based in Loveland. His Wildlife Window column appears in the Reporter-Herald every Thursday.

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